Eleanor Perényi (1918–2009)
Autor de Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden
Sobre El Autor
Créditos de la imagen: photo:emerickbronson
Obras de Eleanor Perényi
Liszt the Artist as Romantic Hero 12 copias
Dmitri Shostakovich 1 copia
Obras relacionadas
Best-in-Books: Pray for a Brave Heart / The Bright Sword / The Tumult and the Shouting / The Dog / The Woman who Would… (1955) 2 copias
Saturday Evening Post July 16, 1966 No. 15 — Contribuidor — 1 copia
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre canónico
- Perényi, Eleanor
- Nombre legal
- Perényi, Eleanor Spencer Stone
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1918-01-04
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 2009-05-03
- Lugar de sepultura
- Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, Connecticut, USA
- Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Washington, D.C., USA
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Westerly, Rhode Island, USA
- Lugares de residencia
- Stonington, Connecticut, USA
- Educación
- National Cathedral School
- Ocupaciones
- magazine editor
gardener
biographer
memoirist
novelist
aristocrat - Relaciones
- Stone, Grace Zaring (mother)
- Organizaciones
- Harper's Bazaar
Mademoiselle - Biografía breve
- Eleanor Perényi, née Eleanor Spencer Stone, was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Ellis Spencer Stone, a naval officer and later military attaché at the American Embassy in Paris, and his wife, Grace Zaring Stone, a novelist. She attended the National Cathedral School for Girls in Washington, but left before graduating to travel in Europe with her family. In 1937, at age 19, she met and married Zsigmond Perényi, an Oxford-educated Hungarian baron. They went to live at his family’s estate in the province of Ruthenia, at the edge of the Carpathians, then under Czech control. There she helped to restore the 750-acre farm with a forest, a vineyard, and a distillery. As World War II began in 1940, Baron Perenyi, a social progressive, urged Eleanor, who was pregnant with their son Peter, to return to the USA. He was drafted into the Hungarian Army and later joined the Hungarian resistance to the Nazis. He stayed in Europe after the war and the couple divorced in 1947. She settled in New York and later Connecticut, and worked as an editor at several magazines, among them Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, where she served as the managing editor. Her memoir of her youth and married years, More Was Lost, appeared in 1946. It was followed by a novel, The Bright Sword, in 1955. She wrote the biography Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero (1974), which was nominated for a National Book Award, but did not achieve fame until publishing her book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (1981), now considered a classic of garden writing.
Miembros
Reseñas
In 1937, a nineteen year old American named Eleanor Stone, whose father was a military attaché to the American Embassy in Paris and whose mother was a successful novelist, was charmed by a young Hungarian nobleman at a dinner party held at the American legation in Budapest.
Baron Zsigmon Perényi (Zsiga) called on her the next day, they spent much of the rest of her week in Budapest together; and on her last evening, they went out to dinner.
All of this was written about with such charm, and this is how she recalled that evening when she came to write this memoir:
At last he said, “It’s a pity we are both so poor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because otherwise we could perhaps marry.”
I looked into my wineglass.
“Yes, we could,”
There was another pause which seemed to me interminable. Then he said, “Do you think you could marry me anyway?”
“I think I could decidedly.”
So we were engaged.
Eleanor’s parents, reasonably concerned about the speed of the romance, the youth of their daughter and the prospect of her leaving them for a new life in a part of the world they didn’t know, insisted on a year’s engagement with the young lovers returning to their own worlds. They agreed, but the romance didn’t die and they were married. Zsiga gave up his job in Budapest, so that he and his ancestral home, Szöllös.
Young and in love, Eleanor was charmed by the prospect.
A young couple are supposed to be lucky if they can build their own home. It may be so. For me, the theory did not work that way. My favorite idea as a child was what happened in French fairy stories. You were lost in a forest, and suddenly you came on a castle, which in some way had been left for you to wander in. Sometimes, of course, there were sleeping princes, but in one special one there were cats dressed like Louis XIV, who waited on you. Sometimes it was empty, but it always belonged to you without any effort on your part. Maybe it’s incorrigible laziness, but I like things to be ready-made. And when I went into my new home, I had just the feeling of the child’s story. It was all there waiting for me. This house was the result of the imaginations of other people. If a chair stood in a certain corner it was because of reasons in the life of someone who had liked it that way. I would change it, of course, but what I added would only be part of a long continuity, and so it would have both a particular and a general value. If we had built it, it would certainly have been more comfortable, and perhaps even more beautiful, but I doubt it, and I should have missed this pleasure of stepping into a complete world. And there would have been no thrill of discovery. As it was, I ran from room to room, examining everything. I liked it all.
Fortunately she was also clear-sighted, because her new life came with many complications.
Though the young couple’s assets were substantial – a baroque property, 750 acres of gardens and farmland, a vineyard, a distillery and a sizeable forest – and they were far from poor, they didn’t have the capital that they needed to restore the dilapidated property and to run the estate as they felt they should. And though Zsiga was Hungarian, his estate wasn’t in Hungary anymore: it was part of the territory given to the Czechs after WWI, and he needed a passport and permission from the authorities before he could travel there.
Eleanor threw herself into her new life: finding out how to manage the household and the the gardens; learning to speak Hungarian; meeting neighbours and playing her part in local society; and having a lovely time rearranging and furnishing the rooms of her new home, and picking through possessions left behind by earlier generations of the Perényi family.
She was particularly proud of the new library that she created:
This was filled with things to look at. There were the books and the maps; and this room, too, was frescoed. On the vaulted ceiling there were four panels, representing the seasons of the year. In the firelight, with the red brocade curtains drawn, this room seemed to vibrate with faint motion. Everything moved and looked alive, the gleaming backs of the books, the shadowy little figures on the ceiling, and the old Turk over the fireplace.
I loved the author’s voice, and I found it wonderfully engaging. It caught her youthful enthusiasm and her love of what she was learning and doing, and it was wonderfully clear and unpretentious. She wasn’t afraid to be critical – of dirty trains, for example – but I never doubted for a moment that she was looking back with love.
She wrote beautifully, of her life on the estate, of changing of the seasons, the people she met and the things she saw, and with exactly the right details and description to convey exactly what it was like to anyone reading her words.
But she had that life for not very long at all before her world was shaken:
What I know of what happened in the next week of the world crisis I learned later from old copies of Time. Our only source of news, the radio, was taken away from us. All radio sets in the town were ordered turned in. We were presumably going to get our news from a loudspeaker in the town hall. They never set this up. It just meant we had no news of any kind. Then came the order for the farm horses and carriages to be turned in to the army. This was a pretty clear indication that the Czechs were getting ready for a mobilization …
Suddenly, the couple had to decide where it was best to live, when to leave or return to a particular country, how to cope during air raids, how to manage their estate during a time of insecurity and upheaval, and what to do if Zsiga was called up for military service. The life-changing decisions that they were forced to make as the political situation escalated were clear, terribly difficult and heart-breaking.
It wouldn’t be fair to say more – and I’d recommend not reading the very good introduction, that explains more about what happened during and after the war, before you read the book itself – but please do read this book, if you have any interest at all in the period or the setting.
‘More Was Lost’ captures a vanished world, people who lived and loved in that world, and the life-changing choices set before them quite perfectly.… (más)
Baron Zsigmon Perényi (Zsiga) called on her the next day, they spent much of the rest of her week in Budapest together; and on her last evening, they went out to dinner.
All of this was written about with such charm, and this is how she recalled that evening when she came to write this memoir:
At last he said, “It’s a pity we are both so poor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because otherwise we could perhaps marry.”
I looked into my wineglass.
“Yes, we could,”
There was another pause which seemed to me interminable. Then he said, “Do you think you could marry me anyway?”
“I think I could decidedly.”
So we were engaged.
Eleanor’s parents, reasonably concerned about the speed of the romance, the youth of their daughter and the prospect of her leaving them for a new life in a part of the world they didn’t know, insisted on a year’s engagement with the young lovers returning to their own worlds. They agreed, but the romance didn’t die and they were married. Zsiga gave up his job in Budapest, so that he and his ancestral home, Szöllös.
Young and in love, Eleanor was charmed by the prospect.
A young couple are supposed to be lucky if they can build their own home. It may be so. For me, the theory did not work that way. My favorite idea as a child was what happened in French fairy stories. You were lost in a forest, and suddenly you came on a castle, which in some way had been left for you to wander in. Sometimes, of course, there were sleeping princes, but in one special one there were cats dressed like Louis XIV, who waited on you. Sometimes it was empty, but it always belonged to you without any effort on your part. Maybe it’s incorrigible laziness, but I like things to be ready-made. And when I went into my new home, I had just the feeling of the child’s story. It was all there waiting for me. This house was the result of the imaginations of other people. If a chair stood in a certain corner it was because of reasons in the life of someone who had liked it that way. I would change it, of course, but what I added would only be part of a long continuity, and so it would have both a particular and a general value. If we had built it, it would certainly have been more comfortable, and perhaps even more beautiful, but I doubt it, and I should have missed this pleasure of stepping into a complete world. And there would have been no thrill of discovery. As it was, I ran from room to room, examining everything. I liked it all.
Fortunately she was also clear-sighted, because her new life came with many complications.
Though the young couple’s assets were substantial – a baroque property, 750 acres of gardens and farmland, a vineyard, a distillery and a sizeable forest – and they were far from poor, they didn’t have the capital that they needed to restore the dilapidated property and to run the estate as they felt they should. And though Zsiga was Hungarian, his estate wasn’t in Hungary anymore: it was part of the territory given to the Czechs after WWI, and he needed a passport and permission from the authorities before he could travel there.
Eleanor threw herself into her new life: finding out how to manage the household and the the gardens; learning to speak Hungarian; meeting neighbours and playing her part in local society; and having a lovely time rearranging and furnishing the rooms of her new home, and picking through possessions left behind by earlier generations of the Perényi family.
She was particularly proud of the new library that she created:
This was filled with things to look at. There were the books and the maps; and this room, too, was frescoed. On the vaulted ceiling there were four panels, representing the seasons of the year. In the firelight, with the red brocade curtains drawn, this room seemed to vibrate with faint motion. Everything moved and looked alive, the gleaming backs of the books, the shadowy little figures on the ceiling, and the old Turk over the fireplace.
I loved the author’s voice, and I found it wonderfully engaging. It caught her youthful enthusiasm and her love of what she was learning and doing, and it was wonderfully clear and unpretentious. She wasn’t afraid to be critical – of dirty trains, for example – but I never doubted for a moment that she was looking back with love.
She wrote beautifully, of her life on the estate, of changing of the seasons, the people she met and the things she saw, and with exactly the right details and description to convey exactly what it was like to anyone reading her words.
But she had that life for not very long at all before her world was shaken:
What I know of what happened in the next week of the world crisis I learned later from old copies of Time. Our only source of news, the radio, was taken away from us. All radio sets in the town were ordered turned in. We were presumably going to get our news from a loudspeaker in the town hall. They never set this up. It just meant we had no news of any kind. Then came the order for the farm horses and carriages to be turned in to the army. This was a pretty clear indication that the Czechs were getting ready for a mobilization …
Suddenly, the couple had to decide where it was best to live, when to leave or return to a particular country, how to cope during air raids, how to manage their estate during a time of insecurity and upheaval, and what to do if Zsiga was called up for military service. The life-changing decisions that they were forced to make as the political situation escalated were clear, terribly difficult and heart-breaking.
It wouldn’t be fair to say more – and I’d recommend not reading the very good introduction, that explains more about what happened during and after the war, before you read the book itself – but please do read this book, if you have any interest at all in the period or the setting.
‘More Was Lost’ captures a vanished world, people who lived and loved in that world, and the life-changing choices set before them quite perfectly.… (más)
1 
BeyondEdenRock | 2 reseñas más. | Sep 5, 2019 |
BeyondEdenRock | 2 reseñas más. | Sep 5, 2019 | 
Just the sort of garden writing I love. A collection of short essays (organized alphabetically by subject) on everything it seems: plant choices, catalogue perusing, balancing acts against pests, shunning harsh chemicals (she was an organic gardener), designing outdoor space, composting, pruning techniques, controlling weeds and disease. Also on individual plants: strawberries, tomatoes, peonies, daylilies, beans, onions, sweet peas, tulips, potatoes etc etc. The parts that waxed historical were not as interesting to me- although I did pay attention to the section about the tulip craze, and another about the development of rose varieties. The part on historical aspects of garden design, not so much. Her voice is down-to-earth, amusing, frank and informative. I even laughed out loud a few times! This book goes on the shelf right next to Thalassa Cruso and Katherine White (whom she quotes- we are among good company). I took notes (on plant species to look for, mostly) and bookmarked pages. I don't agree with all her opinions, but everyone's methods are slightly different. She avoids the work of carting seedlings in an out of the house, for example (like me, not having a greenhouse) but commiserates on how this style of "labor-intensive" gardening is becoming an anomaly- surrounded by neighbors who use gas-powered, noisy machines that do a crude job instead of the care and finesse could have done by hand. And this book is from the early eighties! I would be glad to tell her (she passed in 2009) that not all old-school gardeners are gone by the wayside, in fact there's a rising cadre of us now.
from the Dogear Diary… (más)
from the Dogear Diary… (más)
Listas
Premios
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 6
- También por
- 3
- Miembros
- 595
- Popularidad
- #42,223
- Valoración
- 4.3
- Reseñas
- 11
- ISBNs
- 15
- Idiomas
- 1
Best known for her classic book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, Eleanor Perényi led a worldly life before settling down in Connecticut. More Was Lost is a memoir of her youth abroad, written in the early days of World War II, after her return to the United States.
In 1937, at the age of nineteen, Perényi falls in love with a poor Hungarian baron and in short order acquires both a title and a struggling country estate at the edge of the Carpathians. She throws herself into this life with zeal, learning Hungarian and observing the invisible order of the Czech rule, the resentment of the native Ruthenians, and the haughtiness of the dispossessed Hungarians. In the midst of massive political upheaval, Perényi and her husband remain steadfast in their dedication to their new life, an alliance that will soon be tested by the war. With old-fashioned frankness and wit, Perényi recounts this poignant tale of how much was gained and how much more was lost.… (más)